Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Had you sought to persuade Vroni Lindl that her environment was squalid, her existence joyless, she would have laughed in your face. In the earlier and peculiarly unregen- erate stage of her being, she might indeed have startled you with a response even less civilized than her impish laughter, and it would have been a hopeless task to convince her that cooped-up town children, the miserable limitations of whose sad dull days afforded no Witch-Tooth as background of the universe, were to be viewed with aught but contemptuous pity. It must be admitted of things really worth having she had her share. The few crooked, hump-backed, sour plum-trees by the back door, — what child worthy of the name would fail to perceive at a glance the inexhaustible versatility of those stunted and delightful objects ? Round the feeble vegetable garden before the front windows stretched a bristling unkempt hedge of lilac, elder, and wild white hawthorn, beneath which in the spring time she found rare and most wonderful violets. In the great pile of wood and fagots, always, winter and summer, just beyond the hedge, she scooped dim and fragrant hiding places and crouched breathless, in an ecstasy of mystery, when none pursued. She diligently wove willow-twigs into her thickly wadded winter petticoat to make a most surprising crinoline. The clayey soil which sorely tried the pafience of her elders ministered only to her joy, for she never wearied of moulding flowers and figures, and drying them in the sun. Her father smiled at her creations; but her mother sniffed and called them idle trash. Finding snails in the woods after a rain — either for home consumption or to sell at the rate of a hundred for twenty-five pfennigs — also added zest to her existence. Whether swinging in the delectable barn,...